[REBOL] Re: Bioinformatics and commercial software products
From: jim::bergenshaw::com at: 17-Sep-2002 15:40
We develop data mining software products for life science research labs.
Our products are used to optimize complex gene sequencing, geneotyping, gene
expression, biomolecular screening, and other high throughput research
processes. Our customers are large, collect data from thousands of
experiments a day, and utilize many different computing platforms (SUN,
Linux, Windows, Compaq Alpha, IBM, etc.) The data that we mine may come
from a number of different sources; relational databases (usually Oracle),
XML databases and files, structured files, flat files, etc.
We are planning to develop a distributed data integration engine to expedite
integrating our data mining products with new customer data sources. Over
time we may add the facility to integrate data from major public and
proprietary data sources and provide data to products other than our. We
will need to distribute the data integration task over a number of servers
(and/or PC grid?) in order to complete it in the time required; usually less
than four hours. Since Rebol is cross platform (we only need to run it on
commercial servers and large Windows 2000 or latter desktops) and provides
built in support for network protocols, it may be a good choice to develop
our new product in. However, I do have some reservations.
I have not found any references to major bioinformatics systems written in
Rebol. Can Rebol handle the data volumes we require, 10+ GBs? There is no
biorebol.org, like there is a biojava.org, a bioperl.org, a biopython.org, a
bioruby.org, etc. Why not? Ruby is a newer than Rebol yet it already has
bioruby.org. I have not found any references to enterprise software
products written in Rebol. Why not? Can anyone point me to some?
I have been playing with Rebol whenever a I have some free time over the
last couple of weeks and like what I have discovered. However, I'm still
not convinced that it isn't fooling to attempt to build a $25,000 software
product on it. I welcome your comments.
Jim
